Welcome to The Garden Helper!

The Garden Helper is a free gardening encyclopedia and guides to growing and caring for gardens, plants and flowers. Helping gardeners grow their dreams since 1997.No-dash-here, you've found The Real Garden Helper! Gardening on the Web since 1997

Episode One... Pondering the Day Away

The boss has been giving me a lot of grief lately...
It seems that she's been getting a lot of e-mails, complaining about the fact that I don't write my moonthly 'Babblings' anymore.
She also eluded to the fact that I never updated my home page like I promised...
and not enough pictures of my gardens and my projects... sigh......
She told me to start writing again, but she didn't say what I had to write about...
so I'll just bore you with tales of some of the things I do around the Gardens of Cedar Hill!

Yesterday, as I ventured out of the hollow log that I call home,
I was appalled to witness two wayward Thrushes blatantly disregarding the rules against drag racing in the front yard!
The little buggers must have been going 150 miles an hour!
Before I had a chance to intervene and explain the dangers of racing to them, one of the Thrushes lost control and crashed head on into the plate glass of the greenhouse.
I rushed to the scene of the carnage, expecting the worst. There in a snow drift, lay the Varied Thrush, unconscious but still alive. I did my best to keep him calm and warm...

It was touch and go for a while, but after an hour of intensive care (and wandering around the garden with him)[/i] I am happy to report that my new found friend recovered and flew back up to his favorite Cedar tree. Hopefully, he has become wiser from his experience!

Moving right along...
For those of you who don't know much about me... you probably already know more than you'll ever want to!
I live in a hollow log, up in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. I spend a vast amount of time wandering through my forest and frollicking in the meadows with the Pixies and the Elves, and an occasional, cute lil Wood Nymph.
I came to my mountain in 1976, and since then I've slowly been creating my own little paradise. I've created thirteen gardens, fountains and ponds so far. I'll be showing you the gardens as well as my projects that are in the works in future episodes. My ideas about landscaping may not fit into your own yards and gardens, but maybe they will spawn ideas and dreams of your own!
[b]The Park[/b]
My latest bad idea was to create a park down yonder. One day I wandered down to burn a pile of stumps that the loggers left behind long ago. I got a bit carried away! (we'll talk about that later....)
In the process of beating back the brambles and the brush I regularly come across cool boulders and stumps and logs and things. This has kept progress on the park moving slowly because I have to stop and move these yard art treasures into the landscape somewhere... (not to mention moving giant ferns that are in the way)
It's not always as easy as it sounds!!!! Sometimes I have to study these objects for quite a while before I figure out the best use for them...
I found these two Cedar logs (one is 4 ft, the other is 6 ft by 26 inch diameter) out in the woods where I'm growing my park... The heart of the logs have rotted out. Hmmmmmmm.... I could make a bunch of nice fence posts if I split them up...
I finally figured it out! Any guesses of what I did?